Red Faction: Armageddon Review - Xbox 360

even reflect enemy attacks outside it. Next is Berserk which is pretty self explanatory, but the more enemies you kill the longer it will last. Lastly is a move called Shockwave, which might not do exactly what you think. Shockwave lifts all nearby enemies into the air and slowly drains their life. Combining this move with your black-hole gun can create some amazing scenes of despair for the enemies!

All of these moves and upgrades are purchased using Salvage, which is actually one thing retained from the previous game. Salvage is collected mainly from buildings and hidden containers scattered around Mars. It is used to unlock every perk in the game. Once you finish the game you’ll also unlock cheats which you can purchase with Salvage too, making it a very vital item to acquire throughout your first playthrough. Volition have encouraged gamers to play through Armageddon more than once, as your next playthrough can be via New Game Plus mode where you keep all your perks, weapons and Salvage in a new game on a higher difficulty. Considering how short the game is (particularly compared to Guerrilla), we’d expect loyal Red Faction fans would be happy to play through Armageddon at least twice.

The most innovative new ability in the game is using your Nano Forge to rebuild destroyed structures. This only works on certain types of structures, such as ramps and bridges, but it is most definitely one of the coolest new features of the Red Faction franchise. What we’d love to see in a future Red Faction title would be an open world with big buildings (perhaps Mars in another 50 years time?) with the ability to destroy and then rebuild entire buildings. This would be an amazing feat of technology for a game, and would make for some very interesting multiplayer.

Multiplayer

With nobody online, it’s tough to give Red Faction: Armageddon a good score for multiplayer. It doesn’t seem like THQ has focused much on retaining players, as the game has been out for less than a year and is already dead. Regardless, if you’ve got friends with a copy of the game then it won’t stop you from trying out the different game modes. Infestation is the newest to the series but not so new to shooters anymore, and you’ll find it’s very much identical to Horde mode in Gears of War. Surviving wave upon wave of all things bad with the difficulty slowly getting tougher, you’ll find this feature in most shooter games in the next 10 years. The other multiplayer mode is simply titled Ruin, and allows you to team up with friends or individually beat goals such as fastest or most destruction on a map. This leads us to the final not-so-good point of Red Faction Armageddon’s gameplay; the game has no competitive multiplayer mode. What was once a huge part of the Red Faction franchise is now not even included. We were both shocked and disappointed at this ...